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Would you like to get lots of environmental and social impact for very little effort? Coffee is a great start. A very small effort yields a huge benefit to our environment and to coffee farming communities.

The human race drinks 1.6 BILLION cups of coffee a day. (I personally consume more than my fair share.) Worldwide, industrial coffee production accounts for more agricultural chemical pollution than any crop except cotton and tobacco. The industrial coffee industry clear-cuts rain forests, destroying whole ecosystems, to build “efficient” coffee plantations that require chemical herbicides and fertilizers … despite the fact that coffee trees grow naturally in the rainforest shade and require none of those chemicals to produce abundantly! So that cup of coffee comes with a large carbon footprint in addition to its chemical dependency

1. Choose Better Coffee

Choose varieties that are organic, shade-grown, and fair trade certified:

organic, so that you know your coffee is not the result of a massive chemistry experiment

shade-grown, so you know that forests were not clear-cut to make way for an unsustainable plantation, and because shade-grown coffee matures more slowly, better developing complex flavors

fair trade certified, which pays the farmer a better price than international commodity markets offer (you don’t want a commodity anyway, you want a premium product).

I hear many say “2019 was the year when the public woke up to the climate crisis”.
This is a misconception.
A small but rapidly growing number of people have started to wake up to the climate crisis.
This has only just begun. We’re still only scratching the surface.